Public telephone units have been in use for many decades. Typically, such public telephone units accept money, normally in the form of coins, in exchange for local or long-distance telephone service. These public telephone units may be located at a variety of sites, which may or may not be supervised. In the case of unsupervised sites, vandals have been known to modify the telephone units in an effort to circumvent the requirement for coin input in order to receive telephone service, or to remove or otherwise retrieve the coins once they have been accepted in exchange for telephone service. One such modification is the drilling of a hole in the side of a telephone unit, and subsequent insertion of an elongate rod or pin in order to facilitize unauthorized diversion of accepted coins to the coin return slot, when the coins should instead be diverted to a coin bank for later removal by authorized personnel. Obviously, such modification is undesirable to those providing the telephone service, as inadequate compensation is received therefor.
Consequently, it may be seen that a need exists for a means or device for preventing the above-described modification, which is preferably inexpensive to manufacture and install.